(gentle music)…- I have the mission data file open…and immediately I can see that we have five variables.…The first three of which are text replacement variables.…Number 4 is a visibility variable,…and number 5 is a pixel replacement variable.…I'm gonna go ahead and use these names…to create the layers that I need.…I can see that I already have a card art layer…and I, in fact, also have a points layer already as well.…

It's a folder.…So, I'm gonna go ahead and create layers for mission points,…mission objectives, and mission name.…Using my text tool I'm gonna choose…to use the OCRA extended regular font.…You can choose to use whatever font you like…but I'm gonna go ahead and click here,…and type in mission_name.…I'm gonna pull that outside of the points layer.…I'm gonna use the type tool again…and drag an area for the mission_objectives.…

Then I'm gonna hit cmd + A,…or ctrl + A on a PC, to select everything,…and then I'm gonna knock that down to a 9 pt. font.…I'll be repositioning these in just a moment.…The last thing I want to do is to create…

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Author

Updated

4/29/2015

Released

4/13/2015

Games often require many variations of a single asset, such as cards, tokens, or badges. Using Photoshop variables, designers can speed up and simplify the process of creating these repetitive elements. They can create a single template for their artwork, load all the text and graphics from an external data file, and generate 100s or 1000s of assets at one time. This workflow also allows for adjustments to the design, text, and imagery very late into the process—without impacting the production schedule.

In this course, Dennis Meyer shows how to create and manage the artwork for an example card game using Photoshop variables. He'll show how to organize a basic template in Photoshop, assign variables for the text and images, and build an external data source in a Google spreadsheet (taking advantage of calculations and other powerful spreadsheet functions). Then he'll show how to load data into the template, export artwork, and make the template available to others.